The Omega Group
by Mikel Midnight
Summary: The new Captain Commonwealth joins with an AU version of Omega Flight, as they battle endlessly revived versions of the original 'Alpha Group' involving much zombie mayhem.


In a modest house outside Calgary, a small, winged, female figure flitted through the unornamented hallways. A pair of men followed her; one masked, and the other whose equine face displayed his extra-terrestrial nature. "This way," said the woman, as she led them into the study.

They opened the door to see an eerie figure, his head swollen and glowing with an internal light as he floated, cross-legged, in the centre of the room. "Michael?" she whispered.

After a time, he turned to look at her. His head returned to normal proportions as the features of Michael Twoyoungmen reasserted themselves. "Julia, good. You brought the others." He floated to face them. "Meteor Man," he greeted the pair, "Ray Gun."

John Walker, who had gone by the name Meteor Man ever since he had acquired the ability of flight after having been struck down by a glowing green meteorite, holstered his weapon. The chainmail on his uniform reflected even the dim light. "Jack O'Lantern," he responded in kind, and then with a nod indicated the woman as Julia Carpenter grew to normal size, her gossamer wings disappearing. "The Sprite told me there was some kind of emergency. What's up?"

Jack O'Lantern's expression was sombre. "I have been contacted by another member of the Alpha Group," he said.

Ray Gun's expression of surprise was evident even on his alien features. "I thought the Alpha Group were all slain?"

The Sprite glanced at him, sourly.

Jack O'Lantern almost chuckled. "Yes, as had I been, of course. But there were others for whom death does not mean the same as it does for mortals." He gestured as if to draw aside a curtain, and the others witnessed the spectral figure of a woman clad in pale blue. "Nelvanna?"

The figure looked disoriented for a moment, at the unfamiliar visages before her. "You have new allies, Michael."

Jack O'Lantern beckoned towards those assembled in the room, "You are welcome to join us, goddess."

The figure shook her head, "No, my body is dead. My spirit resides now in the land of the northern lights, and there it must remain. But the touch of an elder god than I has drawn my attention, and I felt I must warn you … dear shaman, who now resides between life and death."

Ray Gun said, "I have fought gods before," recalling his own perilous battle with the goddess Kadlu.

"Your bravery is known to me, you who have taken the name on Earth of Raymond Gunn. However, you must now face a grotesquery which makes even my own people shudder. A human who calls himself Baron Cemetary has created zombies from the bodies of the original Alpha Group … including my own."

The Sprite shuddered, "That's horrible! What could drive a man to do something like that?"

"Greed," Nelvanna replied sadly. "While behind the scenes he seeks to use them as a conquering army, he also plans to undermine the public image of Department H, intending to gather public support for his own agenda."

* * *

It was aboard the cruise ship Sea Rider that Deborah and Phyllis embarked on their honeymoon trip. They inhaled the salt sea air off the Canadian coast, hands intermingling as they shifted their weight under the gentle rocking on the waves.

Deborah glanced up at the sky, scowling. "Storm coming," she said, seeing the dark clouds. The wind picked up, and the rocking increased. "Do you want to go back to the cabin?"

Phyllis laughed. "No, this is exciting. A little wind and rain won't bother me." She shrieked in surprise however when an ugly black lump was washed aboard the deck.

Deborah approached, and peered closer. "It looks like an animal ,,, oh, it's a dead beaver, poor thing."

Phyllis came up behind her. "Ugh. Can you push it back overboard? Don't touch it … maybe there's a broom somewhere?"

The beaver opened its eyes, glowing red and glaring maliciously. Deborah jumped back and Phyllis screamed.

The boat rocked again as more zombie beavers began to gnaw at its hull, and as an increasing number splashed aboard the deck, they began to gnaw on the passengers, too …

* * *

Meteor Man at the helm, the Omnijet took to the air, heading towards the coordinates Nelvanna had supplied as the most likely headquarters for Baron Scimitar. Not soon after, a second airborne figure joined them. "Michael … " Sprite whispered, pointing at the man who flew alongside: barechested, wearing a bright blue mask & tabard, gloves, and belt, with red tights and boots.

"Some sort of zombie Douglas Andrews," Jack O'Lantern hissed. He remembered his old friend and ally, the former Captain Commonwealth, who had led the original Alpha Group. The man had been assassinated by an alt-Earth counterpart to Doctor Doom, in the Chaos Engine War. Jack O'Lantern became intangible and passed through to the outside of the airplane, and gestured magically. A powerful wind gusted at the soaring figure, sending him tumbling through the air. "Whoah," it cried out, "wait- "

Jack O'Lantern scowled, and set off in pursuit. "What exactly are you?"

"My name is Paul Blackelock," the other man said. "I picked up 3 gold medals in the weightlifting section at the '98 Commonwealth games. After this I followed my other greatest passion, physics. I along with a team of top research designers created a machine capable of holding the body in a state of total cellular stasis; the ramifications for medicine alone were mind blowing, but the night before the planned meeting with the corporation an accident occurred at the lab and the machine was reprogrammed in a fluke series of events that led to me falling into the device and my cells being left in a constant state of semi-stasis leading to my invulnerability to all but the hardest hits, and the ability to draw energy into my fists and knockback and disorient my foes. That night, a pair of impossible spectres conjured themselves to offer me the role of Captain Commonwealth, and the next day I was contacted by Department H."

Jack O'Lantern remembered his old friend's account of his own origins. "A new Captain Commonwealth," he said quietly.

The other man nodded. "Department H sent me to contact the new Omega Group."

"We are soon to be at war against a possibly overwhelming foe," Jack O'Lantern said. "If you have the pedigree and the abilities you claim, you would be welcome to battle at our side."

"I'd be honoured," Captain Commonwealth said.

"Baron Cemetery has chosen to violate the natural order," Jack O'Lantern continued, after explaining the nature of the foe they sought, "just as I do through my continued presence on this level of reality. The elemental forces of our land have given me leave to remain even though my own existence violates the laws of death. Although I do their bidding, I am acutely sensitive to the way in which he has reached past the spheres of the living to re-animate the dead."

He brought Captain Commonwealth aboard the Omnijet, introducing him to the rest of the team. Meteor Man was wary; he considered Doug Andrews one of the finest Canadian of patriots, and considered it presumptuous for an unknown entity to attempt to fill his boots. However, he understood the enormity of the peril they faced, and grudgingly accepted the newcomer.

It was when they passed over Montreal that Jack O'Lantern directed them groundwards. Outside the newspaper headquarters for the Montreal Star, they indeed saw grotesque versions of the original Alpha Group … Le Beaver, Iceboy, the Steel Chameleon, Thunderfist, and unliving renditions of Nelvanna and Jack O'Lantern himself … terrorising the populace. Meteor Man landed the Omnijet, and joined by their new ally, the team headed out to protect the streets.

Meteor Man drew forth his gun and he, Captain Commonwealth, and the Sprite took to the air; Jack O'Lantern hovered close to the surface while Ray Gun began to reshape his limbs into living armaments, lightning bolts crackling from his extremities.

Jack O'Lantern hovered close to the surface and scowled at the unliving rendition of his human body, and began to summon the elements to combat it, while the zombie which bore his face twisted the forces of nature itself as it mounted an attack.

Ray Gun approached Nelvanna and began to reshape his limbs into living armaments, lightning bolts crackling from his extremities. He hoped the powers granted to him by the goddess Kadlu would assist him with this zombie version of another one.

Meteor Man took to the air. The crumbling version of Iceboy utilised his own advanced technology to generate waves of cold at his attacker, deflecting the little meteors that shot out from the barrel of Meteor Man's gun.

The Sprite hovered around Steel Chameleon, and the zombie who resembled Edward D. Holman, the man who founded Department H himself, took a martial arts stance, and the watch-like device he wore began to charge his hands with electricity,

Captain Commonwealth took on Le Beaver & Thunderfist, the former's strength-heightening exoskeleton and the latter's explosive punch challenging even his invulnerability.

The two teams were closely matched, but perhaps due to the slowed reactions of their undead brains, the re-animated Alpha Group began to lose ground, until they were finally destroyed.

Captain Commonwealth wiped his hands together. "Now, on to Baron Cemetery himself?"

They heard a strangled cry, and the team whirled around to see another set of foes shambling towards them. "By the gods," Jack O'Lantern said, "he has found a method of replication, allowing him to craft multiple copies of each of them." He was aghast at what his supernatural senses revealed to him, each set of Alpha Groups physically indistinguishable yet with fundamental alterations at a foundational level: one group appeared to be secret cyborgs, one group appeared to be displaced time slices, one group appeared older, another to be from a near-identical alternate reality, and on and on.

Ray Gun shouted a battle cry in his alien language, his hands morphing into living, magically electrified chainsaws, and hurtled himself into battle, decapitating as many as he could. He dived into the first group he saw, leaping in with his whirling chainsaw hands. This zombie clone group appeared to have extremely slow reactions and skin that was thick and tough. They did not put up much of a fight, and Ray Gun noticed this group's skin was scaly, thick, like a crocodile's hide. As he severed through the neck of one and plunged his chainsaw hand straight into the chest of another, he expected blood splatters. However, he was greeted in combat only by flying bits of cold flesh and the sound of distorted moaning.

"Baron Cemetery seems to be favouring quantity over quality," Meteor Man observed. "This so-called undead army shouldn't be much more than an inconvenience." As another cluster of undead clones hobbled towards him, he took a moment to briefly glance at the rest of the group's luck.

The team members that could take to the air were criss-crossing over the groups of undead, cutting lines through the already pathetic enemy formation. Skulls popped and bone fragments flew. Where an undead would fall, its comrades behind it would clumsily trip over the corpse. Those that were hit with exploding bone fragments merely marched on, not even a momentary notice or hesitation for their fallen comrade.

Team members on the ground stood just out of arm's length of each other, making sure the other would not be surrounded. A cybernetic version of Le Beaver lunged, only to have his arm severed at the elbow, quickly followed by a severed neck. Sparks flew and the electronic lights faded as the massive corpse hit the ground. A magical red mist, formed by one of the team members - who could tell in this chaos? - floated over several undead modified with poisonous quills. The undead plodded mindlessly into the mist and wretched, contorted, and fell as their rotting skin began to fizzle and melt off of their bones.

And so it went on, each team member dispatching one foe, then the next, then the next. The undead fell easily, but there always seemed to be another hungry set of jaws and grasping hands reaching for Omega Group at every moment. Finally, the swarm of undead became waves, and those waves quickly became ripples. Finally, there were lone stragglers.

Jack O'Lantern levitated above the very last undead. It was apparently late to the brawl on account of tripping over the defeated corpses of its comrades. One modified zombie of the Sprite struggled to her feet, pushing herself up with insect arms as the wasp wings on its back fluttered. Jack O'Lantern gestured magically and then saw the mutated zombie had huddled close to the arms of another one, which glanced up at him. Jack O'Lantern focused his deadly aim on his own visage. He hesitated for a moment, hovering in the air. It was an undead clone of himself. The pathetic creature below him stood, staring, waiting, not attacking. A garbled sound came from its dead throat.

"…ill… eee." It struggled to say. Jack O'Lantern paused for a moment, but his guard remained up. He stared at the undead clone of himself and his lover, waiting for it to speak again.

The undead spoke again. "Kkk…ill… mmm…eee." it pleaded.

Jack O'Lantern summoned lightning from the heavens and mercifully obliged.

* * *

Baron Cemetery looked up, appalled, as Captain Commonwealth effortlessly tore away the protective door from his headquarters. The quintet were covered in rotted gore from the battle. "I was raised from birth to be a warrior for my people," Ray Gun said, "but even I had no taste for this carnage."

"I shall call on the powers of Damballah," the man said, colourful garb swirling as he ran towards the statue. He fell to the ground en route, kneecaps shattered by projectiles from Meteor Man's gun.

Captain Commonwealth strode over and the man screamed as he hoisted him over his shoulder, effortlessly. "What do you want me to do with him?

Jack O'Lantern mused. "I shall take him to the old Gods of the North. He has committed sacrilege against Nelvanna and her family, and they will be the ones to decide his fate."

The Sprite peered at their new ally. "And what are your plans?"

"You did pretty well for yourself out there," Meteor Man said. "You'd be welcome in the Omega Group, and I think I speak for the others, too."

Captain Commonwealth smiled. "I'd consider it a privilege."

* * *

NOTES:

OMEGA GROUP:

" ... I suppose I could come clean once and for all and tell you about 'The Omega Comics Group,' but I'm sure I'll regret it.

"What it was, basically, was my turning out a vast number of ten page comics drawn in coloured biro on those horrible coarse Woolworths jotters with a little girl in a Mob-cap on the front. These included such breathtaking concepts and characters as 'The Crimebusters', a ripoff of the Avengers that featured Meteor Man (who could fly and had a gun that shot little meteors out of the barrel), Ray Gun (whose secret identity was Raymond Gunn), and Jack O'Lantern and his female partner, The Sprite (The Spectre shacked up with The Wasp ... but then, who isn't these days?). As I'm sure the discerning reader will notice, my widely acclaimed sense of gritty realism coupled with dazzling concepts was clearly visible even then." from an interview with Alan Moore in ARKENSWORD #10, April 1984

This version of Captain Commonwealth created by Ashley Rega.

ALPHA GROUP:

Le Beaver - heroic version of the guy from HOWARD THE DUCK; although he was something of a terrorist, he considered himself a patriotic Canadian hero.

Iceboy - the Canadian representative to the international superteam EuroForce published by Marvel Italia.

Jack O'Lantern - Michael Twoyoungmen in a mortal guise.

Nelvanna - probably the most famous Canadian superhero, and alluded to in mainstream continuity as Snowbird's mother.

Steel Chameleon - Edward Holman in this reality founded Department H, filling the James Hudson role; included because he has already been published by multiple companies, and I needed someone with an 'H' surname to found Department H!

Thunderfist - an old Canadian hero who shares a name with an obscure Marvel character.


End file.
